Editor’s note: This commentary is by Roger Bourassa, a native of Winooski currently living in Colchester. He served as an Air National Guardsman for 11 years and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
[L]ast Tuesday afternoon, I spoke before the Vermont Senate Committee on Government Operations regarding Senate Resolution 5, which strongly opposes the basing of any nuclear weapon delivery system in Vermont. I told them about my 11 years of service in the Air Guard serving as an F-89 radar intercept officer with the 158th at the Vermont Air National Guard, as a C-97 navigator for Military Airlift Command in New York, and as a weapons system officer for the Air Defense Command in Maine.
As a crew member on the F-89 with the Vermont Air National Guard (VTANG), we were to defend the northeastern part of the United States from an attack by Russia. Our F-89s carried nuclear missiles to accomplish this mission. The F-89s carried two high explosive missiles and two self-propelled rockets mounted with nuclear warheads (called the AIR-2 Genie nuclear tipped air-to-air missile). The missiles and nuclear warheads were stored in Burlington. Part of the aircrew checklist was to insure the proper mounting of these weapons prior to taking control of the aircraft and prior to takeoff. As crew members, we were purposely excluded from knowing where the nuclear warheads were stored at the airport. That information was known only by the ground crews responsible for transporting and loading the rockets.
We did not carry nuclear weapons on our routine training flights out of Burlington. Rather we carried inert missiles and rockets on training flights. But our nuclear weapons were armed when the aircraft and crew members were on alert status. Being on alert status meant that our bombers were on the ground loaded with nuclear weapons, and were ready to scramble (take off quickly) once given the order.
I remember being given the order to scramble once while at VTANG. A Russian bomber had penetrated our airspace. By the time we reached the air space violation, the Russian bomber was back in international air space. In Maine, I was scrambled twice with the same outcome. Penetrating one another’s air space was a game played by both the Russians and the United States to gather intelligence. Make no mistake, we carried nuclear weapons in this game. And had we been given the order, we would have launched our nuclear weapons. If that had ever happened, we could have started a nuclear war.
We were trained in how to quickly maneuver out of the area after we launched our nuclear rockets at the Russian bomber. This was in order to save our lives from being caught up in the the nuclear blast. We knew there was the possibility we too could be killed by the nuclear explosion if we were too close. Strangely enough, we were never told what might happen to the rest of the world after our launch. We knew there was no way to recall the rockets once we launched them. But I don’t remember at the time, ever thinking that we could start a nuclear holocaust.
Crew members and ground crew all had to have Top Secret clearances, and we were not allowed to disclose any information to the public about having nuclear weapons at the airport. The Department of Defense and the Air Force did not tell the public about our nuclear mission or about the nuclear weapons stored in Burlington.
My personal experience with past Air National Guard nuclear missions leads me to believe that the public will be kept in the dark should the Air Force decide again to give the Vermont Air National Guard a nuclear mission. In other words, we could have a nuclear mission without the governor, legislators or the public knowing about it.
Having a master’s degree in international relations, I have learned and cannot help but be concerned about how many of our international conflicts were initiated by blunders, mistakes, miscalculations and/or failures in our military/political systems. But there is no safe level of failure when nuclear weapons are involved.
Having a nuclear bomber based at the Burlington Airport is an existential threat to Burlington, to the Northeast and to our humanity. Prohibiting the F-35 nuclear delivery system from being based in Vermont means one less possible catastrophe from happening to us all.
